ETHNOS AND GLOBALIZATION: Ethnocultural Mechanisms of Disintegration of Contemporary Nations. Monograph

The significant financial and social expenditures on governing the colonies with their primitive material production after the war – which did not recoup the cost of supporting colonial administration and security forces – led to the dissolution (according to several substantiated opinions, the dismantling from above) of the largest colonial empires of Europe and the transformation of former colonies into a neo-colonial exploitation regime. Characteristically, the United Kingdom offered partial independence to its colonies and protectorates after war, thus passing the government expenditures and moral responsibility for the low standard of life from the metropolis onto the administrations of new states.

Therefore, the transformation of colonial dependency into neo-colonial turned out to be not liberation but a form of raising the profitability of the capital through the nationalization of expenses (put onto governments of new states in the periphery) coupled with the privatization of profits from the most profitable companies remaining property of the capital of nucleus countries.

At the same time, decolonization of the countries of the global periphery, which took place a historically short period from the beginning of World War II to the middle of the 1960s, lowered political contradictions between countries of the capitalist nucleus (leading to two world wars between nucleus empires), giving the capital equal access to the markets of former colonies.

Paradoxically, it was decolonization – which lowered political contradictions between nucleus countries fighting for monopoly over resources and markets of colonies, included in the economy of metropolises – that allowed them to grow closer politically (NATO, EU, G7, etc.), focusing on the victory in the Cold War and, above that, accelerating economic globalization.

Evidently, obtaining nominal independence – i.e. a change in the international legal status of various territories – is essentially incapable of automatically changing its position in terms of the global economic hierarchy.

The established system of economic elites, increasingly independent from national governments, is keeping a number of countries and a group of elites on the periphery as eternal debtors, which allows other groups to stay part of the nucleus, raising their standard of living at the expense of the resources of the periphery.

Characteristically, systemic opposition, including so-called “anti-system’ movements – i.e. mass social protests oriented towards overcoming “backwardness’ and increasing in some way the standard of living of certain population groups – is an important part of the process of permanent marginalization of the geopolitical periphery. This includes other workers’ movements in the nucleus countries, and communist and national liberation movements in third world countries (under various slogans, from national to religious to fundamentalist).

The joint result of their actions lies in the fact that, while introducing local tensions into the system short-term, they become, in turn, a stabilizing factor, creating legal grounds for building up the system of repression and total control over the population – which, in fact, is what is required for the global economic hierarchy to function efficiently and with fewer risks.

The uncertainty of global development is to a great extent being strengthened by the fact that, apart from old power hubs, China, combining civilizational-cultural, economic, industrial and power centre functions, is confidently moving forward into first place in the global economic hierarchy.

Another attribute of globalization, closely linked to the growth of a propensity for conflict and differentiation, is a major acceleration of social processes, engendering the problem of loss of control and, correspondingly, the instability of development.

Steady acceleration of social processes is increasingly frequently leaving behind their analysis and study, and, correspondingly, purposeful regulation. An additional factor contributing to the diminishing control is time constraints on control (over money flows, in particular), curbing the volume of impact regulation.

Another widely accepted attribute of globalization is the establishment of global digital space as a qualitatively new, supra-spatial social reality, whose meaning is more and more comparable to the role of the physical space and objective physical reality.

By admitting means of communication, the storage and spread of information (digital media), digital paperwork and digital trade (digital money), and navigation, and integrating these into an unbreakable unity, the digital sphere has become the fourth spatial dimension, directly and immediately linking people who are in different places across the planet. This change to the topology of the social space, having de facto become four-dimensional, has led, in particular, to a historically immediate global spread of virtual social networks as a qualitatively new form of social group, the relationships in which are effectuated through the digital space.

Another consequence of the establishment of the digital space, directly integrated with the social milieu, is a major acceleration of social processes, whose speed is no longer limited by the speed of physical movements and the spatial factor.

It took global digitization some twenty years to turn the globe into a “global village’, where everyone is potentially linked to any spot in the world and has access to previously impenetrable volumes of information. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this phenomenon is not being followed by adequate reflection on the significant negative social consequences of digital globalization and is being seen through the rose-coloured glasses advertising the IT industry.

So, the digital acceleration of social communications and social processes, losing spatial limitations, is the reason for the appearance of new types of social instability and the loss of equilibrium, as destructive, catastrophic social processes which do not require the investment of time and resources are being accelerated first of all.

On the other hand, the digital sphere and indirect man-machine social networks are engendering a qualitatively new level of purposeful and centralized interference of political agents in the life of the society and individuals, which means the establishment of new technologies of alternative power and new power agents. Multi-agency, anonymity and the indirect character of digital power, acting through the digital sphere, engender new types of social threat.

An increasing number of social transactions and relations are being carried out through the digital sphere, which is superseding, replacing and transforming the whole range of social relations and institutions in the circumvention not only of regular social practices, but of legal procedures, too.

As a result of total computerization, a qualitatively man-machine social sphere has appeared in which each individual is taking up an increasingly dependent, unequal state, liable to be manipulated.

The example of digital globalization shows that real globalization is not exhausted by processes of integration and convergence following the establishment of the global market and global economy. Globalization is going beyond the economy, by whose terms it was first defined, and taking on a more general character, leading to a wide range of social processes, problems and threats of various types related to key social structures in society.

A paradoxical situation has appeared, where public attention is focused on economic and technological globalization, but leading social tendencies of globalization have still not been realized by the scientific community as objective development patterns. Correspondingly, attributes of globalization that are an inalienable part of it have not been fully discovered.

Another attribute of globalization is its essential multi-agency – that is, not only the existence, but also the dominance of subjective and ideological components, reflecting vital interests of conflicting agents of global development, competing for increasingly scarce global resources in all spheres and dimensions.

It follows from the multi-agency of contemporary global processes that there is no objectively pre-arranged, predetermined outcome of globalization, which supporters of globalization’s Western model insist on.

The Western view on globalization comes from an understanding of globalization as the stable perpetual dominance of an exclusively Western civilization to the end of time, which negates the very possibility of historical choice as such. Hence it appears that all non-Western and, consequently, peripheral, participants in global development may fit into and, as a result, passively adapt to the reality of the new global order, but cannot significantly change it, including locally. It has been suggested that a future global “suprasociety’ would be a unipolar semblance of a feudal, hierarchical system with the West at its centre and concentric circles of dependent geopolitical periphery of various levels around. In particular, such a model of sociohistorical development was proposed and studied by Zinovyev.¹⁵⁹

However, in recent years, the unipolarity of the modern world-system and the resulting pre-arrangement of history have been called into question by such influential experts Huntington and Haass. Richard Haass, Chairman of the US Council of Foreign Relations, sums up the “moment of unipolarity” that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s and offers a concept of “non-polarity”.¹⁶⁰ At the same time, the significant difference between “non-polarity’ and “multipolarity’ suggested by many researchers and politicians lies in the fact that active agents, actors in the global process in the time of non-polarity, may be not only states and blocs, as is the case of multipolarity. Other social agents which do not have marked spatial and state-political features may become agents as well: transnational corporations, terrorist and criminal networks, and, above all, ethnic and religious groups, attaining agency.

Despite the canon of economic determinism, the disappearance of habitual spatial, political and economic barriers has not turned and will not turn humankind into a united social subject, a state society, evolving into a predetermined final state, the end of time.¹⁶¹

Therefore, globalization is not an evolutionary approach of the unipolar world to an objectively predetermined stable equilibrium, but global antagonism of a wide range of social agents of various types, with the outcome essentially unpredictable. The issue of birth, life and death of a wide range of social agents determining the look of the future is being decided in the course of the altercation.

The practice of globalization proves objectively that the unity of a newly achieved global world means not the establishment of a united social organism, a global state, but the appearance of a global space, the lifting of spatial and economic barriers between local social communities which used to protect them.

The multi-agency of the global process means a qualitatively new character of globalization: global unity in the global conflict among social agents. The world is united not as an inalienable whole, but rather as the field for permanent global conflict on which the fate of all agents, actors in the global process, is being decided, be they states, peoples, social groups, or legal and physical entities. At the same time, the most important consequence of globalization is the impossibility of escaping global crisis due to its all-encompassing and universal character.

The escalation of increasingly multi-faceted and multi-aspect conflict becomes the essence and the content of the global unity of humankind: a global war unites enemies into a united system faster and firmer than global peace.

At the same time, the state of peace (as an absence of war) may be defined as the state of lower intensity interaction between agents, at least because peaceful coexistence does not pose the issue of life and death of the protagonists.

Correspondingly, the reverse is true: growing intensity in the interaction between agents up to a certain threshold (globalization being an intensification of connections) turns into conflict. From this point of view, universal interconnectedness is nothing but an objective reason for a global conflict.

Indeed, the erosion of spatial and administrative borders has led not to the disappearance but to the aggravation of disagreement among agents, including among civilizations and groups, and the transference of old geopolitical conflicts into new non-spatial dimensions (informational, legal, ethnocultural) whose quantity and role continue to increase.

While earlier crises and altercations in self-sufficient local communities had a local, isolated character, globalization transformed local communities of all levels into open off-balance systems, having created powerful channels for a financial, migrational and informational “transfusion of crisis’, not only spontaneous, but also purposeful (“export of instability”), significantly lowering the stability of the global system in general.

As a result of globalization, a global systemic crisis has united a world-system not through a unity of interests and values, but through a unity of conflicts of the agents of global development, whose interests are objectively antagonistic.¹⁶²

Therefore, the study and analysis of globalization inevitably loses scientific objectivity, inexorably suggesting an outlook on the global situation from the point of view of a certain social agent participating in globalization as the antagonistic conflict among various agents.

Attempts to create a descriptive theory of globalization are doomed to failure as they inevitably transition into the field of politics as the “art of the impossible’, into the strategy and tactics of political governing and political construction and permanent global political confrontation, with no foreseeable prerequisites for it stopping.

In general, globalization as a systemic social phenomenon has a non-economic character. In light of this fact, it may only be adequately understood within the framework of a sociophilosophical and sociohistorical discourse.

As for economic globalization, its role lies in forming a global social milieu as the field for the development and intense interaction of phenomena of a social nature.

1.3. Ethnocultural aspects of globalization

The most important aspect of the sociodynamics of globalization processes is the correspondence of divergent and convergent aspects of social development. The dominant view of globalization as a unidirectional and all-encompassing process of unification and convergence follows from the economic determinism dominant in the scientific community. For example, it is accepted that social groups and communities, somewhat meaningful within the contemporary historical process, are almost exclusively formed by economic interests and relations. Nations and national (local) and global elites are usually considered such historically important groups. As for ethnos and ethnicity, actual ethnicity and ethnic identity are being accepted almost exclusively as belonging to isolated marginal ethnoses, adhering to a traditional lifestyle.

At the same time, the ethnic identity of members of political nations is either completely denied or admitted only as part of a sociohistorical phantom, a historical relic. It is significant that constructivism, as one of the leading movements of the theory of sociogenesis, denies the inseparable evolutionary character of cultural continuity, considering the contemporary flare-up of ethnic consciousness as a result of purposeful political propaganda in the interests of marginalized elites. Admitting, albeit under pressure, the consistent maintenance of ethnicism and ethnic identity beyond archaic communities, constructivism denies the existence of the modern ethnos as a real social community.¹⁶³

Globalization is considered to lead to crisis and the extinction of civil nations and nation states, which lose their economic essence by transforming relatively closed-off national economies into open social and economic systems. Based on that, one may come to seemingly logical conclusions about the inevitability and global character of convergent development engendering a certain global “suprasociety’ in which national, cultural and religious differences are being relegated to marginalized subcultures and will, in the foreseeable future, be completely eroded.

Correspondingly, within this approach, state nations, great powers and their blocs – and, since the second half of the twentieth century, transnational corporations – have been considered as actors in the global process. Globalization of national media markets and then educational systems, with global digital space as the technical basis, is the most important tool of ethnocultural convergence.

Therefore, from the point of view of economic determinism, the globalization of markets and the flows of goods, money, information and migration lead to the convergence and unification of humankind, the erosion of cultural and civilizational borders, and the formation of a new global identity without any alternative as a product of a global melting pot.

However, processes of real globalization, contrary to the logic of economic determinism, suddenly moved toward ethnic, civilizational and confessional divergence.

In this context, we may see the increasing contradiction of economic determinism as a dominant theoretical approach and the reality of globalization.

In 1991, following the triumphant actualization of the Western scenario of the convergence of two global systems, the actual process of globalization – despite the destruction of economic and political borders forming local social communities – moved towards ethnic and confessional divergence. That is why none of the theories of ethno- or national genesis that appeared in the twentieth century can sufficiently explain the post-industrial increase in ethnic and religious feelings.

The long foretold crisis of civil nations became not the synthesis of global supranational and supra-ethnic unity, but the fragmentation of post-industrial nations into ethnic and confessional groups.

Despite expectations, melting pots on the regional and global local level did not lead to the creation of a homogenous society with a common identity.

An example of an unexpected crash of the melting pot theory in the course of globalization is the United States itself, where the term “melting pot’ appeared as an idea of a polyethnic, multicultural and multiconfessional immigrant nation. Strictly speaking, the US melting pot has not been functional since the migration wave of the end of the nineteenth century. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the US society has been made up of a range of ethnic communities (Italian, Irish, Chinese, African-American) steadily maintaining their identity in an urban social environment.

Ethnocultural fragmentation of US society not only persists but is increasing, despite the higher mobility of the workforce than in Europe. Notably, at the end of the 1960s, the United States was forced to abandon the melting pot model and turn to multiculturalism under the pressure of several ethnocultural minorities, especially African-Americans.

According to Lozansky¹⁶⁴, author of the monograph “Ethnoses and lobbyism in the United States’, ethnic minorities and diasporas in the United States are becoming more and more separated, creating within the bodies of power all the more powerful lobbies compared to the corporate lobby (of transnational corporations), and even a party system. At the same time, ethnic lobbies in the United States purposefully lobby the interests of the states from which they came: diasporas within themselves not only turn into diasporas for themselves, but are becoming the tools for ethnic metropolises to influence states admitting migrants.

Orientation of the United States toward the formation not of a single alloy in the ‘furnace’ of many nationalities, but toward forming of a motley multi-faceted multiculturalism led to logic results, a strengthening of positions of ethnic minorities.¹⁶⁵

To prove his theory, Lozansky emphasizes that other US authors are worried about the threat of ethno-confessional fragmentation of the American nation, up to the possibility of Balkanization.

In particular, Huntington remarks on the increasing influence of civilizations in global politics and the stability of the links between immigrants and their countries of origin, believing that the basis for unity in the United States and the USSR is ideology, not a single national culture.¹⁶⁶ This points to the fact that the role of ethnic cultures and ethnic communities remains rather important. State ideology plays a vital part in the integration of society in this case.

The United States is a leading power hub in the contemporary world order and may be seen as an accurate enough model of the global post-industrialized society. Hence it follows that the increasing role of ethnicity seen everywhere in the world, the ethnicization of politics and the conversion of diasporas into agents of local and global politics, is not a chance paradox but one of the key attributive characteristics of globalization.

Despite the expectations of the end of the twentieth century, the globalization of the economy with its convergent focus engenders processes of ethnocultural divergence. This partly reflects the ubiquitous strengthening of competition for vitally important resources, objectively caused by the deepening of the global crisis of resources and demographics, but cannot be reduced to economic competition.

The erosion of borders of nation states and national economies has brought to life the process of the reconstruction and regeneration of ethnicities, including the process of reinvigoration of large state-forming ethnoses of the Old World, buried by the theoreticians of the twentieth century.

The ethnicization of collective consciousness and the politics of the states of Eastern Europe and the former USSR may be seen from the viewpoint of social constructivism, understanding the reinvigoration of ethnicity as a purposeful reconstruction of ethnos in the interests of local elites, creating an ideological base for their nation state project.

The widely discussed ethnocultural crisis in Germany, provoked by the increasing lack of loyalty of diasporas to the host society, is an example of the recuperation and regeneration of state-forming ethnos from the bottom up, happening largely in contradiction to the interests of German political elites, avoiding accusations of German nationalism and ethnicism.

At the same time, the crisis of the policy of multiculturalism in Germany is a de facto affirmation of the increasing ethnocultural fragmentation of classic European nations, a manifestation of a general tendency toward globalization.

Erosion of the economic and political borders of nation states, while not overcoming the contradictions of the global crisis of resources and demographics, transforms the conflict, transferring the contradictions from the interstate level to the level of social groups including ethnic communities.

As a result, the link of ethnic and national self-identification to the economic model,¹⁶⁷,¹⁶⁸ quite fitting to the reality of the twentieth century, is becoming increasingly contradictory to the reality of globalization. As a result, nation and ethnos, seen as relics of bourgeois and even pre-state eras, are exerting more and more influence over the collective consciousness and global politics. The expected corporate globalization in reality turned out to be the globalization of ethnic diasporas and ethnoses.

Therefore, the reality shows that as globalization and the crisis of nation states strengthen, ethnocultural differences are not smoothed over: the contemporary ethnos does not assimilate or integrate into a global multicultural environment, but steadily maintains its identity.

At a time when social institutions of the nation state are living through a deep crisis, ethnos and ethnic and religious self-identification are experiencing a period of revival and are in active demand among the masses.

The forced realization of the “ethnic renaissance’ of marginalized ethnoses and emigrant communities does not preclude the scientific community from ignoring the main problem of the current theory of ethno and national genesis, the problem of the existence of large state-forming ethnoses as the most large-scale social communities, making up the basis of the social community, largely independent from state institutions.

Driving forces and social mechanisms of the ethnocultural fragmentation of the contemporary society and their connection to globalization on the one hand and to the crisis of the contemporary post-industrialized state on the other, have not been sufficiently studied either.

It would be logical to suppose that the objective driving force behind sociogenesis processes, transformation and the competition of social communities during globalization is their ability to satisfy the most important needs and interests of their members, ensuring that members of the communities have additional opportunities and advantages in a more competitive and conflict-ridden global environment, devoid of protective spatial and political barriers.

The cause of the divergent fragmentation of contemporary nations into ethnocultural parts was the narrowing of the state’s social functions, born out of the globalization of local economies The state of the industrialized era has in a relatively short period abandoned a whole range of social guarantees and functions, vitally important to citizens and making up the institutionalized basis of the social state in the middle and the end of the twentieth century. The post-industrialized state is increasingly losing the functions of largest employer, social guarantor and social regulator, including the role of regulator of ethnoconfessional relations and migration processes.

No less important is the state’s steady abandonment of its most important function as basic social elevator, carrying out principles of equality and ensuring vertical social mobility, uniting participants with the help of a united social future, the most important function for sociogenesis.

While classic European nations and national elites of the industrialized era were formed by state systems of universal education, the post-industrialized privatization, commercialization and globalization of education means not only a lowering of the previously attained educational level but also of the social attractiveness of the nation state and its institutions, rendering them less and less capable of creating a social future for members participating in the nation as a social community.

The “revolt of the elites’ plays an important role in the ethnocultural fragmentation of contemporary civil nations, signifying the increasingly open abandonment by former national elites of key social responsibilities of earlier compatriots that created the basis of the welfare state and civil society in the second half of the twentieth century. Obviously, the abandonment by the state of system-building social functions leads to the devaluation of the nation as the most important social community for the population, ensuring the individual and group interests of its citizens.¹⁶⁹

Elites’ abandonment of social cooperation and support within the nation forces an individual to search for alternatives to a nation – social communities – increasing competitive ability and security and allowing him or her to adapt to a new structure of society, changing his or her identity.¹⁷⁰

Sociological research has shown that the choice of a new basic identity is predetermined by the individual possessing an alternative ethnic identity which takes the lead under the new conditions. As the system of social relations of a citizen with the state and its institutions are deconstructed, the citizen almost inevitably chooses an alternative ethnic identity, seeing him- or herself as a member of an ethnos first of all. Evidently, ethnic affiliation predetermines the choice of religion in many cases.

As a result, globalization, while dismantling the social institutions forming nation and national identity, engenders the ethnocultural fragmentation of polyethnic nations into ethnoses, which under certain circumstances become politicized, giving way to hidden and obvious ethno-confessional contradictions and conflicts.

Therefore, the understanding of globalization as ethnocultural unification and convergence born out of economic determinism is not proved by the social reality. The crisis of the civil nation as a system-building social community in the industrialized era in the course of globalization stimulates processes of divergence and fragmentation of nations, including the reinvigoration of ethnicity, the consolidation of global ethnic diasporas and religious confessions as agents of global politics.

Transnational corporate elites, linked to global economic and global finances – and, as large and significant social groups on a global scale, possessing their own identity – have been formed in the course of globalization. Nevertheless, social roles and statuses proper to such groups, which would have significance for most individuals, have not been formed.

Therefore, instead of convergent development leading to a synthesis of a united humankind, one may see largely forced contact between local communities and groups, caused by the essential characteristics of globalization and leading to a battle for resources and increasingly non-spatial separation of competing social communities. Having created a united global field for competition for limited resources, globalization has strengthened processes of stratification, separation and group cooperation – that is, the processes of social divergence.¹⁷¹